August 05
2003

Discovering Buffy.
First-person accounts of how Buffy followers from around the world came to watch the show.

Vaguely remember watching the movie on video a couple of years after it came out and it failed to leave any impression on me. Then I watched a bit of season one when it first aired on BBC 2 on a Thursday night (I swear that 'Welcome to the Hellmouth' had the stuff a slayer in the 1800s before the opening credits) and got hooked on season 2 and watched it avidly ever since.

I remember when they were first asking for these essays. I thought long and lovingly about my 200 words, and then I went to post and the link didn't work, and all was lost. Disappointed!
Well, glad to see they fixed whatever was wrong. Its so interesting to read other fan accounts.
My hookage came about while sick in bed watching the season one ep "Angel." I found it intriguing, and of course unlike anything else on TV. Then I saw "Prophecy Girl" and it was all over. The "Tell me my FORTUNE!" scene dug into my heart and gut and the rest is history.

I used to own a video store and had seen bits of the movie and decided based on it not to waste my time trying BtVS, however, in season five, I was channel surfing when it caught my eye and as with every other fan it is now more than just a tv show to me.
For me I would go as far as to say it has become part of my life, I am a Buffy Addict.

My first Buffy episode was Anne, at the start of season three. I didn't know anything that came before, and was only vaguely clued in about the whole slayer myth. But I did understand that the writers had taken the main character out of context and into a whole new town. And I thought that was incredibly brave. A few more episodes in, I was hooked.

I remember saying that the show was a guilty pleasure in the beginning. At some point, the guilt part just went away.

I was channel hopping and stumbled upon The Pack. I had heard of the series through a music mailing list, but at the time the series didn't air in Europe and the whole downloading thing wasn't happening yet. And I didn't think I would like it anyway. Vampires? Never liked them, never did like the old Dracula films - too scary. Five minutes into The Pack I was hooked. I had guiltily watched series like 90210 when I was younger, and always liked the high school setting, but this was better. This was much, much cooler and smart. A friend turned out to be a fan. She had all of Angel series 1 on video and we binged on it one weekend. I went out and bought all the Buffy video boxed sets that same summer (they were available up to S4 at the time, and S5 came out not too long after)

I caught part of the movie on television maybe a year or two after it was released. It was near the end – where I believe the movie gets very boring. Hence, I decided it really wasn’t for me. I wasn’t any big vampire fan at that time. The first time I ever watched an episode of the series was during the summer after Season 2. I had recently tried watching Xena and I hated it. I must have been bored, and I saw that Buffy was on. So, I gave it a try just to see why some people seemed to love this show. Then, I could mock those people for watching a stupid show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I also thought I had never given the movie any real chance. The WB reran the Season 1 episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”. I watched it, and I couldn’t fathom how much fun I was having. I thought Cordelia was terrific and very believable. I actually knew a few girls in high school like her. I really liked Willow too. I had enough fun to want to see more episodes. Thus, I began watching reruns of Season 2, and I was still having a lot of fun watching it. After I caught the “Surprise/Innocence” two-parter, I knew I had stumbled across one of television’s best shows. From then on, I was hooked. Here I am today visiting BtVS/Angel websites religiously and loving it. This is all from incidently watching some ridiculous-sounding show one night. Thank God!!!

I had seen the Pack at someone’s house, then I went to France but before going, a boy I was babysitting made me sit through the season 2 finale. I thought "Interesting but I'm going to France in 2 days, so whatever".
Fast-forward 3 years and a bit. During the summer the episode introducing Olaf was on and I saw Spike sitting with Xander at the Bronze, I was confused thinking the blond guy was evil, but then also remembering Becoming I thought "Wasn't Buffy an only child? Who's Dawn?"
I then caught the end of the third episode of season 3. The one after the 2 parter, Buffy was telling Spike she thought she had been in Heaven
I thought "whoa depth!!!"
Lucky for me Space was airing Buffy from the beginning in Canada, so I gave it a chance. With no spoilers I entered the first 5 seasons of Buffy. It was awesome. I was also then watching season 6 at the same time. So I'm new, and I love season 6 the best, I've converted 3 people.

Well, since we're sharing... I watched and enjoyed "Welcome to the Hellmouth" and "The Harvest", but don't recall watching more than an episode or two until the end of the second season. (Being a college student without a TV for most of the year accounts for this more than lack of interest, I think.) But then I watched the last episode of Season 2. I remember thinking, there are basically two ways this can go: she can kill Angel, and it'll be a terrible sacrifice, or they can save Angel at the last moment. And then they proceeded to do both, which just floored me. And I've been a hopeless fan ever since.

The very first Buffy episode I saw was the last ten minutes of "Seeing Red." I had no idea what the hell just happened, and though I saw something there, I held off watching until I could see it from the beginning (kind of like I'm doing right now with Farscape.)
A little while later in mid-May, I had the worst case of the flu I've ever had in my life. I had a 100+ temperature for four days. Oh, and it also happened to be half a week before finals, which meant I had 3 English papers to write plus 8 more short papers for the final, plus a paper in Myths and Legends of East Asia before I could even begin to study for my finals in all my other classes. It being the end of the semester, my scholarship money had run so low that I had to make a choice between having gas money to drive to school, getting medicine, and getting food. I chose a little gas and a little food.
So there I was, unable to keep my eyes open for more than three or four hours at a time, re-reading "The Great Gatsby" for the third time in two days, when I decided to just give up and watch TV, an activity I had done rarely in the past year. What I saw was the last 10 minutes of "Graduation Day, part 2" on FX. I still had no idea what the hell was going on. Next on was of course "The Freshman," the first full episode of Buffy I ever saw. After that, I actually felt a little better and decided to give the huge workload another try.
For the next week, I did nothing but read and write, breaking only to pass out, eat, or watch Buffy for two hours a day (and the occasional Scrubs, Kids in the Hall, or Simpsons episode). Every day that I was holed up in my house, shivering beneath the covers while trying to keep straight the multiple Jose Arcadias of Aureliano Buendas in "100 Years of Solitude," I looked forward to watching Buffy.
That's how Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped me keep my scholarship, not to mention helped me in deciding to add a film studies minor. I've rarely missed an episode since.

I was a fan of the show from the very beginning. I remember seeing the movie when I was really young and thinking it wasn't that bad, mind you, I was only 12. I loved the Paul Rubens death scene. So, when they started promoting the series in 1997, I was really looking forward to it. I ended up watching it on a WB Chicago station at 5pm and then again on my local WB station at 8pm. That became my ritual, watching the same episode twice every week. Soon a couple friends and I started having Buffy nights during seasons 2 but by season 4 I kind of fell out of the loop. I don't know what I was thinking, work and school are not nearly as important as Buffy! When season 5 started and Dawn was introduced, I was too confused to continue watching. It wasn't until after the Season 5 finale that I starting watching Buffy again on FX and the reruns reeled me back in, now I couldn't imagine life with it.

Allow me to be the pig here. I never thought Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was a good idea (I'm sure having Luke Perry in the film didn't help my enthusiasm,) but either during Season 2 or the summer after Season 2, I saw a picture of Sarah Michelle Gellar, and thought she was hot as hell. I became an occasional Buffy watcher. Even by Season 3, I would miss a week sometimes. I can't say for sure when I was making sure I was home to watch Buffy, but I do know that by Gingerbread, I was wondering what the hell was up with Joyce (how bad of a parent can you be?) and by Amends I was very much sold on the show. There was no way in hell I was going to miss another episode after Xander and Oz debated the properties of what different color Kryptonites did. By the end of the season, I had discovered that five of my friends were also avid watchers of the show, we were having Buffy dates to watch the show, or calls to each other immediately following, and then they pulled not one but two episodes from the rotation, including the season ender. Angel started the next year, and while the show didn't work for me as a whole, at first, Doyle rocked...and then they killed him. WTF? It was just a whole bad year for my Joss watching.

I was like 10 or 11 yrs old when buffy first started and saw the master vamp and was to scared to watch lol but my cousin said it was a good show. So i watched the season priemere of season 2 and just watched it every tuesday night at 8pm on the WB in Tampa and got hooked. I've barely missed any episodes since.

yeah my sister was a fan of the movie and i would watch it when she did, and i actually thought it was really funny and cool, even though it occasionally gave me nightmares. When they started showing commercials for the show i was all excited, but my sister wasn't for some reason(i guess she sensed that it wasnt completely vapid and shied away from it). I was 9, and the show just blew me away. By the time The Pack came around it became a part of my very being, and thank god it never left.

You guys are making me feel old! I keep looking back at when Buffy started and thinking how young I was - and I was already 29.

I had always liked the idea of the movie but I never got to see it, so I was happy to hear it was being made into a TV show. The paper had a nice review of it before it premiered, so that night I sat my husband down in front of it and made him watch it with me. We were both hooked from the start. I can still remember which episodes I missed the first time around during the first season (Angel and Teacher's Pet) because they still held a bit of mystery for me until I'd seen them a million times on FX.

Love the show. Always have, always will.

(BTW I finally saw the movie somewhere in there and all I can say is I sure am glad I DIDN'T see it before the TV show!!)

I saw the movie (by myself - I was one of about two or three people in the cinema) when I was twelve, and it remained one of my absolute favourites for years! (All that Joss dialogue - come on, it was cool. And certainly the high point of Luke Perry's career.) I avoided the series for the first year and a half because I didn't think it would measure up, but then I caught it some time in the middle of Season 2 when my mother and brother were watching it and I was instantly hooked - I think it was a Xander or Willow thing. I haven't managed to convert anyone else, though, and my mother and brother have long since stopped watching (and now pay me out for being a fan... *sigh*). Thank god for Whedonesque!